Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Two)

4.

The First Visit 

At a few different points in the second half of October Rosie asked her family when she could expect the winter weather to start, and she got a different answer each time she asked it. First Uncle Franklin told her that it usually started snowing around Thanksgiving, then Grandpa told her that she could expect it after Halloween. Finally Grandma and Aunt Margaret explained to her that most years what would happen was that there would be some flurries or perhaps one or two snowy nights beginning at the end of October or early in November, and then in the waning days of November the snow started in earnest and stayed on the ground in some form or fashion till spring. That being the case as it may be, it seemed that the weather reports had been saying that this year in particular New England could expect a major snowstorm in the days heading up to Halloween. Two sets of guests cancelled their reservations because of this, and the Baring household set about planning for this big Halloween storm.

            Mags took over shopping from Uncle Franklin and brought home canned food, lots of tea and coffee, and several boxes of taper candles from various department stores and buyers’ clubs around Greenfield. Grandpa Baring spent an afternoon out with a pair of young gay women whom he was friends with for some reason, and came back with a new winter coat and a manual that was supposed to exposit certain things about the kind of hot water system that the house had. Grandma and Uncle Franklin brought in chairs and tables from outside. As for Rosie, she put up storm windows, made sure the family’s three cars were properly serviced and up-to-date on all their checks, and spent a few hours each day with her laptop open checking every now and then for new reports on the nor’easter as it developed. So passed the last couple of days before the storm was supposed to hit Western Massachusetts.

            Rosie and Mags were actually on the UMass campus when the storm itself hit, driving through it on their way back from an Asian market in another part of Amherst. There they had picked up a can of some sort of Vietnamese coffee that Uncle Franklin insisted on having in the house; evidently it had been in Chicago that he had first discovered it once upon a time. They pulled up a side road at first and parked the car by one of the UMass dorms as the clouds of white descended darkly; then the silver-blue flash of an exploding transformer lit up the sky from somewhere else on campus, and Mags decided to high-tail it home.

            “How long did Uncle Franklin live in Chicago?” Rosie asked, by way of a topic to discuss that would distract her from Mags’s almost preternaturally aggressive driving.

            “At least fifteen years or so if I’m not mistaken,” Mags said. “He first left home because of some sort of conflict or jealousy with my father, actually, to hear Aunt Margaret and your grandmother tell it. Don’t ask me the details of that, though; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. He made a life for himself out there and it was not actually the accident that killed my parents that made him feel as if he had to come home; it was some other thing that happened, that had something to do with a woman he was close to out there, if I’m not mistaken. One of those classic tragedies, or classic subgenres of personal tragedy, if you prefer to look at it that way.”

            “I don’t prefer to look at it that way at all,” Rosie said.

            “I suppose I could say that’s just as well,” said Mags. “It helps me to think of this life of ours as part of a ‘story’ of some sort, but I’m willing to accept that that might be a little cold of me. Back when I had a therapist I went to see she said much the same to me. Food for thought, I guess; the question is just whose thoughts, you know?”

            “I think I know what you mean, but Ma—Mags you are about to hit a moose.”

            Sure enough, there was some sort of large animal—maybe not a moose, but something large enough and uncanny enough to fool a suburbanite like Rosie—lumbering across the interstate just in front of them. Mags swerved hard to avoid it and the car drifted far into the shoulder. It took them several hundred feet of roadway to straighten themselves out again.

            “We can’t get home soon enough,” Mags observed. “That transformer blowing back on campus was sure a wakeup call, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I sure as hell would,” Rosie said, thankful that they hadn’t hit that animal, whatever it had been. “By the way, what do you think that animal was?”

            “You seemed pretty confident it was a moose.” Mags cast a quizzical eye on Rosie. She seemed amused by the situation in which they had just found themselves. Rosie had ridden in the car with Mags several times now and knew that it was her custom to drive like a madwoman whenever there wasn’t a cop car to be seen, but she had supposed that the danger of doing so on ice-slicked roads with very poor visibility would mitigate that. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have made it even worse, likely because Mags was getting downright desperate to get home. Rosie was starting to seriously wonder how bad exactly her cousin expected the storm to get. It did seem like, mostly on Mags’s instigation, their household had gone to much more trouble to prepare for this nor’easter than had many people in the area. Rosie wondered if Mags was one of those odd people you ran into now and then who seemed to have some sort of prescience about such things, or, on the other hand, whether she tended towards paranoia about winter weather due to past experience or by some quirk of her nature.

            The got home in one piece. Evening was coming on. Uncle Franklin told Rosie that she could expect to hear odd sounds from the radiators as they gurgled into heavy-duty service for the first time this winter. Grandma and Grandpa were upstairs making sure the storm windows in one of the guest rooms were properly secured. What constituted an improperly secured storm window Rosie could not guess at, but she figured she might learn soon enough. She hoped she had done a good enough job.

            Mags spent most of the evening, before the power failed, making a bracelet for something called Carmilla and brainstorming ideas for the more-familiar (to Rosie) The King in Yellow. Then the power did fail and she decided to go to bed. It was about nine o’ clock and without a way to keep her laptop charged up there was not much more left to do. So she lit a candle, cracked open a book, and turned away from Rosie to settle in for the night.

            Rosie herself must have drifted off at some point soon after, because the next thing she knew it was around midnight, the storm was still raging, and somebody was boiling a kettle of water. Something about the way this house was set up made it difficult to tell what direction sounds in it were coming from, but in this case it must be in the kitchen. Somehow, she could not think how, Rosie felt a compulsion, a needful frenzy, to go out to the kitchen herself and see who it was.

            Mags was sleeping soundly when Rosie crept out of their room, tiptoeing like a disobedient child. It was still dark-white outside. If the stove had been electric rather than gas there would have been no way any of them could use it under these conditions.

            There were two or three intervening rooms or hallways between Rosie and Mags’s room and the kitchen; it depended on whether you went clockwise or counterclockwise around the front hallway’s central staircase that led inevitably and composedly down to the rarely-used front door. Rosie went counterclockwise, the long way round, which passed through the front hallway, the dining room, and a section of the living room in which a spinet piano much like her sister’s stood collecting dust. The sound of the singing kettle was still going on and on and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Rosie felt a chill, then a sudden pump of warmth as she passed the radiator that stood at the doorway through with the living room and kitchen communicated.

            The kitchen, miraculous to report, was empty. The candles were out and the stove was off. Rosie realized with a sudden laugh that the sound of the kettle, the sound like a kettle rather, was in fact the steam in the pipes and in the radiators, keeping the cold out in this winter’s first furious storm.

            Rosie’s heart was pounding for reasons that she could only guess at as she looked out the kitchen window at the storm. There was a light in it, and what looked like a woman stuck outside, insufficiently dressed for a nighttime blizzard, on the patio or in the overgrown garden beyond it. Rosie, not thinking, ran out into the mudroom, put on her coat and gloves over her pajamas, and went out to see what was wrong.

            The doorway to the patio opened into warm air and the dim not of an autumn midnight but of nine or nine-thirty one evening in late June. The “door into summer” of the Heinlein title must, Rosie thought, have been something like this, this moment when she walked outside into something like the past.

            A woman was indeed standing there, in that summer dusk. She looked much like Mags—glaring eyes, russet hair—but she was clearly someone who was entirely new to Rosie, someone who was uncanny and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, and probably not family—doubly strange, doubly elsewhere. Fireflies were flitting around her, and she was wreathed in their glow as it were in the fires of purgatory, with a pschent of them circling her high-held head. Her hair was up in a high knot or bun and she was in the corset-and-hoops clothing and accoutrements of a hundred and fifty years before. Rosie suspected without having to know, or knew without having to suspect, that she was a ghostly vision of some ancestor, or a manifestation of some ancestral strain in her and Mags’s shared familial past. The ghost looked solid, and looked like she had a full complement of emotion and intellect and will, but there was no way for Rosie to be sure of any of this unless she spoke to her.

            The dead began to speak. The ghost had the strange accent one sometimes was liable to hear in plays or movies about Lincoln, or Whitman, or other figures of that day and period. She spoke respectfully but with a clear note of feeling that she represented some higher place or calling. It was a note that Rosie, amazingly to her own mind, found herself respecting as well as resenting. It came by way of an introduction.

            “I am Margaret Clooney, ancestress, as you might say, of your relation Margaret McNulty,” the ghost said. “I lived in these parts many years ago after being born during a sea voyage from Ireland, just before or in the earliest days of the famine there. You are Rosary Newgarth, a friend and to some minds perhaps a kinswoman of my descendant, are you not?”

            “I am,” said Rosie. “To my time it’s the night of October 29, 2011, a Saturday. Mags—Margaret, your namesake, anyway—is asleep in bed.”

            “Asleep in bed, Saturday night,” the ghost said. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.’”

            “And you?” Rosie asked. “What are your day and time?”

            “Late evening, June 23, 1860,” said Margaret Clooney. “A Saturday also. St. John’s Eve, if that holds any meaning to you. Just a few days after midsummer.”

            “The light out here is that of a summer night, I can tell,” Rosie said. “And the fireflies too, of course. Are you—that is, have I slipped back into the ‘present’ for you, or am I ‘seeing’ your living life with you as a ghost, a phantom, here for me to show me the way the world use to be for you? I’m sorry,” she said with a sudden burst of self-consciousness. “I hope the question isn’t gauche, or unwelcome? And I’m sorry for how badly I worded it.”

            “A little gauche perhaps, but not unwelcome—or, at least, it is clear and easy for me to see why you are asking it,” said Margaret Clooney. “I am, as you might say, a ghost, although my true self, my soul, my heart, is elsewhere than this garden. I will miss it, when I go totally beyond.”

            “And this is 1860 I’ve entered into?”

            “This is, yes. However, observe.” Margaret Clooney glided up onto the patio, which here was an older-fashioned porch or portico, and pointed a spectral finger over Rosie’s shoulder into the kitchen window. Rosie saw that it was not a kitchen after all but a storeroom of some kind, a dimly firelit chamber in which two men were arguing. It would seem that it was money about which they were arguing—some sort of debt, something that one of them experienced as a violence done to him. Rosie could not tell if it was the indebtedness that was being claimed to be violent or the unmercifulness with which the indebtedness was being received. Like any moral economist, she was on the side of the debtor.

            “The two men arguing—who are they?” she asked.

            “Men of the year 1813, when this home was first built ere in Greenfield,” Margaret Clooney said to her. “The debtor, who is the first owner of this house, is a man by the name of Asaph Oldmeadow. Do you know of the Oldmeadows? If you do not, it would be my pleasure to tell you a bit about them. They are a part of my history, and my descendant’s history, and your history also.”

            “I’ve heard of the Oldmeadows. The Barings are descended from an Oldmeadow woman, aren’t they—that is, aren’t we?”

            The ghost of Margaret Clooney nodded. “Your grandfather’s grandmother, whom I believe he is given to occasionally mentioning, was Horton Oldmeadow,” she said. “The name Horton was reused in the family, just as the name Margaret has been reused. Probably the name was something along the lines of Hortense in the beginning—In principio, if you’ve ever looked through a Vulgate Bible. This Horton Oldmeadow was the daughter of a close friend of mine—but that is a story for another time.” The ghost, Rosie realized, was vanishing as she said this.

            “I will see you again, Margaret?” Rosie asked.

            “You will,” said Margaret Clooney. “I promise you that; you will.”

            She dissolved into the firefly dusk. Rosie blinked, then went back inside, into the storm-choked house. The kitchen clock read twelve-thirty, and the radiator pipes were still singing, joyful in having a reason to serve at last.

5.

The Folktales 

A week or so into November, once power had been restored in the house and life had gone more or less back to normal, Rosie asked her grandfather about Horton Oldmeadow. Who he told her about instead was Horton Baring.

            Horton Baring had been Grandpa Baring’s older sister, the oldest of three siblings (the middle sibling, the first Franklin Baring, had been killed in the Korean War). She had been half-feral and barely literate, with a knack for beating people up that had already emerged by her early teens. In 1949 she had been expelled from Greenfield High School three weeks before she would have graduated, and she had spent most of the 1950s in and out of the Franklin County sheriff’s office. (Rosie asked her grandfather if she had ever actually been convicted of anything and he had said that on two occasions they had managed to make contempt of court stick and kept her around for a few weeks before letting her out again.) She had been a liberal smoker and drinker but was not known ever to have associated romantically with either men or women. Going into her thirties she had become something of an enforcer of her own justice, and it had actually been she who had brought Carl McNulty into the household after beating up his father as his father had been about to beat up him. This had been in 1968 or so, turbulent times for Grandma and Grandpa’s growing family as for the world as a whole. Carl and Horton had, by Grandpa’s account and also by Mags’s, been inseparable pretty much as soon as she had knocked his father to the ground on his behalf. A year or two after that Horton had died in unclear circumstances, still in her late thirties.

            “What happened to her?” Rosie asked. “If it’s not too hard to say.”

            “Wouldn’t say it’s too hard exactly,” Grandpa said. “She took a fall from the French King Bridge—you know, that bridge out on Route 2 to the east as it passes over the Connecticut going towards Boston. She’d been visiting with a friend who lived on a hill nearby by the name of Weatherhead, and she was walking across the river back from Weatherhead to meet with another friend when something happened. Never figured out what. Might could have been an accident, suicide, someone she’d crossed coming back to get her…” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “Any number of things my sister could’ve gotten herself involved in,” he said. “Anyway, it damn near broke this family apart. None of us ever really looked at little Carl the same after that, and I think he knew it.”

            He showed her a picture of the three siblings then. Horton and Franklin I both looked a lot like her grandfather, like Tom. They all had the same ruddy complexion, meaty hands, and tragicomic resting expression. The picture must have been taken right before Franklin I had gone to Korea because Grandpa seemed already to be in his early teens and Rosie recognized Horton’s dress as a fashion of the very early fifties.

            “What did your brother do in Korea?” she asked.

            “Fighter pilot,” said Grandpa. “Lived on a base in Japan, near Osaka; commuted to the war zone in his Sabrejet from there. Got shot down by some Chinaman in a MiG right before the ceasefire in ’53. Nineteen years old.”

            Rosie had not been aware that the Air Force had ever had fighter pilots quite that young, and wondered if perhaps Franklin I’s exploits were being exaggerated somewhat—if he had instead been a wingman or something like that, or if it had been a bomber instead of a fighter, or, or, or…She shook her head. In the end, it didn’t really matter. He was dead, and Horton was dead, and her grandfather was still very much alive.

            “Probably shouldn’t say Chinaman,” her grandfather said. “Not polite, not these days.”

            And that was their first conversation about Horton Baring. It took a few more conversations in that month of November to get to the subject of Horton Oldmeadow, who had lived a much less disputable and apparently much less tragic life. Grandpa still remembered some of her stories, when he had been a child, about her own childhood—the days of taffeta bustles and shirtwaists, narrated to the days of pinstriped suits and trilbys.

            Also right after Halloween Rosie started going on little adventures around Western Massachusetts with two women about her and Mags’s age named Mattie Greer and Ellie Soren. Mattie and Ellie were not a couple; they were definitely both gay, but they seemed to be gay separately. Mattie was a graduate student at UMass, apparently doing a master’s in some foreign literature or another, and Ellie had arbitraged a BS in economics much like Rosie’s own into a job writing ad copy for a liquor distributor. On one day in particular the three of them were at a sort of embankment or landing along the Connecticut River, from which one could watch almost minute by minute as crimson-and-gold October turned to russet-and-silver November. Mattie, who had a taste for swimming in ludicrously cold water that Mags apparently shared, was doing backstrokes in the river’s shallows; Ellie, who looked and talked like she should have been much more adventurous than Mattie but apparently was not, was in a sport coat and a light scarf, hitting golf balls across the river with one of Grandpa Baring’s nine-irons.

            “You know, until he handed you that club this morning I didn’t even realized Grandpa played golf,” said Rosie.

            “He doesn’t,” said Ellie. “Fore!” Whack. A ball went flying up, up, and left Rosie’s vision against the whitish sky. Mattie seemed unperturbed and contemplative.

            “Well, be that as it may, hitting golf balls across a river is certainly a new idea,” said Rosie.

            “Is it?” asked Mattie dreamily from the water. “I’m not so sure. Did you ever see that old episode of—what was it?—the sitcom.”

            “Fair enough,” said Rosie, who knew what Mattie was alluding to, but only vaguely. “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

            “Mattie’s been watching a lot of sitcoms lately,” said Ellie. “She says they have a lot of the ‘amoral moralism’ of folk stories. That’s what she’s studying at UMass. Fore!” Whack.

            Mattie swam up to the landing and hauled herself up halfway onto the shore; Ellie handed her a towel to wrap around her shoulders. “ ‘Amoral moralism’ is a phrase I’m using in my thesis but I’m not actually sure how much I like it,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun, though. Writing the thing, I mean. I’m glad I went back to school.”

            “How old are you exactly?” Rosie asked.

            Mattie crammed on her glasses under her wet sheets of black hair and frowned at Rosie theatrically. “Don’t you know never to ask a lady that?” she said. “I’m twenty-five.” She yawned and pulled herself fully up out of the water. “Well, that was exhausting,” she said. “It probably kept my heart rate nice and low, though.”

            “Is this something you do every winter?” asked Rosie, gesturing at Mattie and at the river.

            “No, I actually just started doing this a year or two ago on your cousin’s recommendation,” Mattie said. “Where she got it from I have no idea. Turn around, I’m about to change back into my clothes.” Rosie turned around and Mattie kept talking. “Did you ever hear of the folktale called ‘The King of Cats’ or ‘The Prince of Cats’? I think it’s delightful, and it has the same feature that I notice in sitcoms where, when you hear it told, you keep thinking it’ll build to a moral conclusion and then it just doesn’t. It’s from Cornwall originally, I think; I found it in a Breton source; technically the literature I’m studying is French.” Rosie shook her head and said she hadn’t heard of it. “Would you like me to tell it to you?” Mattie asked. “You can turn around now, by the way.”

            Rosie turned around. Mattie was now dressed much the same as Ellie was and was wringing out her swimsuit so she could put it in her backpack. “Go ahead and tell me ‘The King of Cats,’ Mattie,” Rosie said.

            “So, the story goes,” said Mattie as they started to walk back towards Ellie’s car, “that an old farmer, long ago, had a mean, cussed old black cat, as so many old farmers do. He was walking along a lonely road one evening, trying to figure out what to do about the cat, when he saw a procession of other cats, carrying a cat-sized coffin. He marveled at this sight, of course, and up to him there walked a cat with a grave and official-seeming expression, like that of an undertaker or a coroner.

            “The grave, official-seeming cat said to the old farmer, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ The old farmer, not knowing what this meant, went on his way and went home to his own cat, and to his wife.

            “A few nights later, the farmer was walking along that same road when he saw the same procession of cats and coffin. The cat coroner or undertaker said to him again, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He still did not know what this meant, and he went home and the cat clawed him and his wife nagged him.

            “Finally, a third time, the farmer was walking along and he saw the funeral procession. The coroner or undertaker said to him, for the third time, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He was struck with a great fear, and he ran, did not walk, on home.

            “He said to his wife something to the effect of ‘I keep seeing these cats, this strange procession.’ His mean, cussed old black cat was looking at him intently now.” At this point in the story they reached Ellie’s car and set about getting into it. “He said ‘I just don’t know what it means,’” Mattie went on. “‘They’ve spoken to me, you know. They want me to find somebody called Tom Tildrum and tell him that Tim Toldrum is dead. I don’t know who either of those men are!’

            “‘Tim Toldrum is dead?!’ the mean, cussed old black cat suddenly screamed. ‘Why, then, I am now King of the Cats!’ And with that, the cat rose up the old farmer’s chimney like some, flew out into the night with a blood-curdling caterwaul, and was never seen or heard from in those parts again. And so goes the story.”

            “Isn’t there a Steven Vincent Benét version of that story, Mattie?” Ellie asked, putting the golf club and her back of golf balls in her trunk.

            “I don’t know who Steven Vincent Benét is,” said Rosie.

            “I think there might be,” said Mattie.

            On the drive back up to Greenfield there were a few more flurries. Rosie tried to think of an Italian folktale that she had once heard from her grandmother; she wanted to tell it to Mattie and Ellie as a sort of reciprocation, since she had enjoyed the story about the King of the Cats more than she had expected to. Try as she might, she could not put her finger on it. It had something to do with the devil, and a fig tree, and an old woman being cursed to have small breasts; it was just the kind of bawdy story, with faint hints of internalized misogyny, that Grandma Newgarth loved. Eventually it occurred to her that she could just tell them those elements—devil, fig tree, old woman, small breasts. Mattie might be able to put it together from her own knowledge base, or, if not, she might be able to look it up whenever she got home or to wherever her laptop currently was.

            “I think I have heard that one,” she said when Rosie told her the basic elements. “Neapolitan or Sicilian or something like that, right?”

            “I believe so, yeah,” said Rosie. “I heard it from my grandmother, on the non-Baring side. Do either of you have grandparents who have that—well, who get salty with you like that?”

            “My grandmother does occasionally,” said Ellie. “I think most of Mattie’s family is probably too buttoned-up for it. That’s probably why you can come across as stuck-up and retiring, isn’t it, Mattie?” she shouted into the back seat where Mattie was lying down.

            “Well, that and the depression,” muttered Mattie, who seemed to be half asleep.

            Rosie felt suddenly like she he had gone through the looking glass. There was something irreducibly manic and madcap about spending time with these two women, something that was starting to make her uncomfortable. Surely they couldn’t be like this all the time; with her own family, with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin and Mags, and certainly at home with Mom and Dad and Madison, it was easy enough to imagine that they more or less always were the way they appeared to be. It was easy enough to imagine that Madison was thinking of George and Ira Gershwin more often than not, or that Mags spent most of her free time reading genre novels and making those bracelets based on them, or that Aunt Margaret was just as reluctant to talk about her estranged husband and children with everybody else as she was with Rosie. Surely that wasn’t the case here; surely Mattie and Ellie were not always hitting golf balls across rivers and saying things like “well, that and the depression,” were they? Had her grandfather somehow put them up to it, as a way to entertain her after the downbeat conversations he had been having with her lately. She obviously could not just ask them, but she felt the need to know.

            They returned to Greenfield. When Rosie got back home she found Mags and Uncle Franklin standing together pensively in the kitchen, looking out the window across the driveway to a plot where they had planted some garlic just before the blizzard. Rosie wondered what they expected it to be doing right now, exactly; you planted garlic in the fall before the first frost, and it burgeoned in the winter and came up in early spring. The book that Mags had shown Rosie had been very clear about that, and the process sounded very straightforward.

            It occurred to her that maybe they were not, after all, expecting anything from the garlic in particular. Maybe the garlic was beside the point, and their gazes out the window were in reality gazes at something quite different, much more dangerous and arcane. Maybe they were just standing there, looking pensively, looking carefully, looking at something together because they, they in particular, could not bear to look at each other.

6.

The Holiday

December 2011, that year’s long Advent, was a time of consequence. Between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas Eve, Herman Cain suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the United Kingdom severed diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kim Jong-il died abruptly and was succeeded as leader of North Korea by his twentysomething son, the Obama administration formally declared an end to the Iraq War, and the German novelist Christa Wolf died at eighty-two. Christopher Hitchens also died, as did Václav Havel. Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines and killed almost thirteen hundred people. In Western Massachusetts, winter came on in earnest, the water got too cold for even Mattie Greer to go swimming in before freezing over entirely, the days shortened into abbreviations that were already almost completely dark by four or five o’ clock, and Greenfield’s half-dozen or so Catholic and liturgical Protestant churches got fully into the Advent-Christmas season. The thin edge of the present advanced further into the future from the past, the last ends of Rosie and her family came closer day by day as always, and Mags started dating somebody.

            “I’ve had a crush on him since I was young,” she explained to a slightly gobsmacked Rosie, “or at least I think I have. We don’t have as much in common now as we did when we were twelve. I suppose I wanted to see there was any way we could recapture those days.”

            “Can I ask if you’ve ever been in a relationship before?” said Rosie. “You’ve never mentioned any exes or anything.”

            “I had a couple of casual hookups at UMass before deciding that wasn’t the way for me,” said Mags. “And I had a horrible jealousy-fueled high school ‘friendship’ with a girl called Jessica Winters. Other than that, no.”

            “What is he like, if you and he don’t have much in common anymore?” Rosie asked her then. For some reason the idea of Mags dating somebody just to see what was like filled her with foreboding. It was like being told that Madison had lost her virginity or that Dad was getting promoted at work—in some sense it represented forward progress, but it was also a move out of a situation to which the people concerned had already long since been habituated.

            “I guess he’s just your typical guy from around here,” said Mags, which did not inspire confidence. “He loves the Patriots and he wants to move to Boston at some point. He’s a manager in a farm store and I’ve had his cooking a couple of times; it’s pretty good, so that’s worth pursuing this for, I think.”

            “Do you want to move to Boston at some point, Mags?” Rosie asked.

            Mags shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “And that’s why I’ve decided I’m not going to have sex with Zachary.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Rosie, “but what?”

            Mags shrugged. “It’d feel like I was ascribing some sort of weight to the decisions he’s making about what to do with his life,” she said. Something about her tone of voice as she said this made Rosie realize, with a sudden realization, that her cousin was seeing this man out of nothing so much as good old-fashioned garden-variety boredom. For some reason that Rosie could not put her finger on, having realized that made her feel a bit better about it.

            Rosie behaved a little grouchily the next day around one of the guests, a woman named Francine Kipperman. Francine was a middle-aged New Jerseyite who reminded Rosie of her mother, and as such, Rosie felt a certain uncertainty around her. She was entitled, or seemed that way; Rosie’s mother was not entitled, so perhaps it was one or more of her paternal aunts of whom Rosie was actually reminded. What Rosie snapped at Francine about was Francine’s complaint that she had missed the foliage season.

            “The foliage season is mid-fall, Ms. Kipperman,” she said with a heaviness to her voice. “It’s December 11.”

            “It’s still fall till the solstice, though.”

            “Are there still autumn leaves on the trees in Morris County?” asked Rosie. “No? Then why would there be autumn leaves still on the trees here? We’re like two degrees of latitude further north, and we’re further inland too. There’s half a foot of snow on the ground.”

            “I paid to see foliage. My hubby Roy told me it’d be here still.”

            “Your hubby Roy was mistaken or poorly informed, Ms. Kipperman.”

            “Are you mouthing off to me?!”

            It had taken the expert—as in literally taught to him at a postgraduate level—conflict resolution skills of Uncle Franklin to get Rosie out of that jam. He had even extracted a promise from Francine to visit Franklin County again next year earlier in the fall. There was a poem by Dickinson that Mags cited to Rosie when she told her about this little altercation she had had.

If you were coming in the Fall

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn

As Housewives do, a Fly

❦ 

If I could see you in a year

I'd wind the months in balls

And put them each in separate Drawers

For fear the numbers fuse

❦ 

If only Centuries, delayed…

“How does the poem end?” Rosie asked Mags once she had trailed off at the beginning of the third stanza.

            “‘It goads me, like the goblin bee that will not state its sting,’ ‘It’ is time—not knowing when something dearly longed for and waited for is going to happen. If it is going to happen.”

            “I think that’s all of us, at some point or another in our lives,” Rosie said with a glance out the bedroom window at the road.

            “I think it is,” said Mags. “On the other hand, I completely understand that I doubt any of us are exactly longing for a repeat visit from Francine Kipperman or her ‘hubby.’”

            “All I can say is that I’m certainly not,” said Rosie with a theatrical little flip of her hair.

            “On another note,” said Mags, “do you have any Christmas Eve plans yet? You mentioned a while back you do tend to go to church on the big holidays. I’d be happy to go to Midnight Mass this year with you.”

            “I’m actually not feeling the Christmas spirit nearly as strongly in this year as in years past, but sure, Midnight Mass sounds good to me,” Rosie said. “What can you tell me about the Catholic parishes in Greenfield?”

            “There are two pretty standard Catholic parishes, like ones you could find anywhere, in Greenfield itself,” said Mags. “One is called Blessed Sacrament and the other one is called Holy Trinity. The main difference between them is that Blessed Sacrament has uglier architecture but prettier music. One town over in Turners Falls there are Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Peace, and the main difference between those is that Czestochowa is very conservative and Peace is very liberal. I’m happy with any of the four since I can go either way on architecture versus music and I’ve never really liked politics with my religion. Do you have any preference given those descriptions?” She cast a somewhat concerned, assessing eye on Rosie, for some reason. It was the kind of gaze that made Rosie feel more relevant to other people’s worlds than she would have liked to be.

            “Let’s go with Holy Trinity,” she saqid. “That’s the white-and-green Carpenter Gothic one across from the co-op on Main Street, right?” Mags nodded. “A pretty building without any political philosophy to speak of sounds good to me for Christmas,” Rosie said. “Maybe if it were the Assumption or something I’d feel otherwise.” She shrugged. “That work okay for you, Mags?” she asked to make sure.

            “Sounds great to me,” Mags said. “Let’s make a plan of it.”

            “Will your boyfriend be coming with us?”

            “Almost definitely not. Are you okay? You sound almost a little jealous.”

            “I wouldn’t say I’m jealous, no,” Rosie said. “I just don’t get it.”

            “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either some of the time with him,” said Mags.

            “Then why…? Never mind. I know there’s a childhood crush involved. That’s reason enough, and I’ll try to be respectful of it.”

            And that was how the conversation between the two of them ended. When Christmas Eve actually did roll around a few days later, however, Rosie went not to Midnight Mass with Mags but to a Protestant service in Amherst with Grandpa and Uncle Franklin. This was how that came to pass.

            Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret had a friend called Clara Warman who lived in Turners Falls. Clara was about seventy-five years old, so a year or a few older than Grandma and Grandpa, and went to the same church in Bernardston that Uncle Franklin usually did. Aunt Margaret, who was agnostic, heard from Clara that she lacked “wheels” with which to get to Bernardston on Christmas Eve. Aunt Margaret knew at this point that Grandpa had prevailed upon Uncle Franklin to accompany him to Amherst, and so she suggested to Clara that she carpool with the two of them. Why exactly Grandpa insisted on going to church in Amherst in the first place, which was to say half an hour away even with no holiday traffic, was a riddle for the ages as far as Aunt Margaret was concerned.

            Clara was happy to carpool to Amherst but was, she said, uncomfortable riding in a car alone with two men, even ones she knew and trusted like Uncle Franklin and Grandpa. So Aunt Margaret offered to go with them. This would have worked out well for all concerned, but mere hours after the decision to do it this way had been arrived at, Aunt Margaret got an unexpected call from her ex-husband, asking that she accompany him and their three teenaged children to the service at the Lutheran church near the Honda dealership. This would have been her first time spending Christmas with her children in about four years. There was of course no way she could say no to this, so she asked Grandma, Rosie, and Mags if any of them were willing to schlep down to Amherst in her stead. Rosie objected to the plan the least, and so off she went.

            The drive down to Amherst on Christmas Eve was in fact a delight. There was a light snow and the other cars on the interstate, and on Route 116 once they got off the interstate, seemed somehow to be in good spirits, as if Christmas brought inert metal to life and emotion just as (old tales said) it imbued nonhuman animals with intellect and will. Grandpa was driving and he had on an old CD of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby alternating holiday standards, with the Andrews Sisters on one track and (of all people) a young David Bowie on another. The car’s heating system was turned up high enough for the benefit of the oldsters to be a little uncomfortable for Rosie, but she barely minded when she kept in mind how cold it was outside. Grandpa and Clara sang along to many of the songs on the CD, and after a while Rosie felt comfortable joining in with them. The level of bonhomie was actually beginning to surprise her. There was something almost like a spiritual experience about it, unselfconscious and looking outwards.

            When they got to Amherst there was, miraculous to report, yet more confusion, this time about to which specific church among the several mainline Protestant churches in and near Amherst Center they would be going. The assumption had been that they would go to First Congregational but it seemed Clara had heard wonderful things about the music at Grace Episcopal and so wanted to go there instead and see how she liked it. They argued for about ten minutes before deciding to defer to the wishes of a sweet old guest and go to the eleven o’ clock service at Grace.

            Grace was a greystone Gothic Revival building overlooking the snowbound common in the middle of Amherst. It was just the kind of church to attract a large congregation for an old-fashioned Christmas Eve, even though, as Rosie was given to understand, most Episcopal parishes these days had a hard time retaining worshippers on ordinary Sundays. She thought that was a shame; it was a lovely building, and she hated to think of a denomination with buildings like this struggling.

            The music was as promised. Rosie had never heard some of the carols they sang that evening—“Good Christian friends rejoice,” a setting of “O little town of Bethlehem” that she did not recognize, a few others. “Silent night” and “Joy to the world” were familiar, of course, as was “In the bleak midwinter,” which appeared on a King’s College Choir CD that Madison sometimes liked to listen to at this time of year. (Rosie missed Madison; indeed, she was surprised to find that most days she missed the kid more than missed most of her friends from high school and from SUNY Binghamton.) She wasn’t sure how Grandpa and Uncle Franklin were feeling about this service; her impression was that the one at the Congregational church would have been much more sober and more stripped-down. Conversely, she wasn’t sure how that one would have made her feel if they had gone to it the way they had planned to at first. It was funny how preferences—needs, even—could be in conflict like that, even between loved ones, between relatives.

            They left the church at half past midnight and came out into the chilly night air. Clara huddled in an overcoat; Rosie zipped her jacket up to the top. In the sky, above the lights of Amherst Center, she could see a few bright stars. Grandpa and Uncle Franklin wished a merry Christmas to five or six different people, then ushered the four of them into the Subaru and headed on home.

            Mags had already long since gotten back from Holy Trinity, which would seem to have its major Christmas Eve Mass quite a bit earlier in the night. She was relaxing in her and Rosie’s room, listening, it would seem, to something acoustic and contemplative. It did not sound particularly seasonal. “Vashti Bunyan again?” Rosie asked, naming an artist of this sort whom she remembered Mags enjoyed, even though as far as she recalled Vashti Bunyan’s voice did not sound much like this woman’s at all.

            “Close,” said Mags in a manner of speaking that signaled to Rosie that she had not really been that close. “Jen Cloher.”

            “Hmm,” said Rosie. “Got sick of hymns?”

            “You could say that. Holy Trinity just does the old standbys for its Christmas hymns. It’s lovely and always lifts my spirits, but once you get out you sort of…how should I put this…?…You sort of realize that there’s been this blast of concentrated Christmasiness that you’ve been hit with hard for the past hour and a half, and, if you’re me, you start to want to listen to something else when you get home. Am I making any sense?”

            “You are,” said Rosie.

            “You’re happy to sit with me listening to this for a little while?”

            “I am,” said Rosie.

            “Good.” Mags—who had just made reference to sitting, to sitting with Rosie—instead flopped down on her bed in that customary girlish way of hers. Rosie sat on her own bed, letting herself relax after what had, after all, been a hectic evening. Something like Christmas joy came down and rested, gently, on the two of them.